Montgomery's Lehmann dominates Hopewell for baseball win

EWING — Connor Lehmann of the Montgomery High School baseball team stands an imposing 6-foot-5, has a fastball that tops out at 86 mph and entered today’s tilt with Hopewell Valley with a sparkling record of five wins and no losses.

The scary part is not the junior right-hander’s measurables or his record, but the fact that, at least on paper, he’s currently Montgomery’s No. 4 pitcher.

“He’s got size; he’s got length, and he gets on top of you quick,” head coach Peter Mueller said. “His actual velocity is good, but his perceived velocity is even better, because he’s so on top of you. It’s a luxury to have a guy like him, because it’s not often you can roll a guy like him out as your No. 4, because he’s a guy who can probably be a No. 1 on most teams. We’re just fortunate to have a heck of a lot of arms.”

Lehmann’s dominant season continued today as he held Hopewell Valley scoreless into the seventh inning, allowing six hits and striking out seven as the Cougars edged the Bulldogs, 2-1, at Fred Walters Field at Moody Park.

The most impressive aspect of Lehmann’s effort was that he danced out of runner-on-second, one-out jams in the first, fourth and sixth innings.

“I left my fastball up today and got lucky with a few pitches,” he said. “Usually I’m a first-pitch-strike guy, but I wasn’t throwing the first pitch for strikes as much as I would have liked today. I got lucky a few times.”

After being held scoreless in a 1-0 loss to Watchung Hills Tuesday and stranding six runners through four innings against Hopewell Valley, the Cougars’ batters were in dire need of regaining their mojo.

Bulldog starter Ryan Fanning appeared as if he would cruise through a fifth scoreless inning after retiring the first two batters on five pitches. But Ben Verducci singled
through the right side, moved to second on a balk and scored on Mike Ippolito’s single to shallow left. Greg Kocinski walked, and Sam Capolongo singled home Ippolito.

“Both of them came with two strikes as well,” Mueller said. “We’ve been preaching two-strike hitting since we’ve been here. There are days like today where it works, and then there are days like (Tuesday) where we just couldn’t seem to get that hit. But I feel like we collectively breathed a sigh of relief when we scored those two, because we got shut out (Tuesday). So it was like, ‘Now we can actually swing a little freer,’ and that did help.”

Lehmann ran into trouble in the top of the seventh, allowing a leadoff walk to Mike O’Donnell and a subsequent walk to Harry Giordano before giving way to Cam Hoos.
Hoos, another tall right-hander, allowed a one-out RBI groundout to Will Karp but rebounded to strike out Aaron Gewecke to earn his second save.

“The schedule we play, it’s impossible to run the table,” Mueller said. “We have an out-of-conference schedule that’s tough, too, and that’s why we play teams like Hopewell. I think that prepares you for anything you can potentially face in the state tournament, so you’re going to take your lumps at times.

“We’ve gone through a spell where we haven’t barreled up the ball as well as we want to, but we’re finding other ways to figure out how to win games, and that’s important. We certainly will need the sticks as we approach the latter part of the schedule.”